1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to network deployment, and more particularly, to the deployment of a hybrid peer-to-peer/client-server private network using an asymmetric viral approach.
2. Description of the Related Art
Maintenance of up-to-date contact information between friends, family, business associates, clients, and customers has always been a challenge and a difficult task. More frequently than not, people change at least some of their contact information such as phone numbers, fax numbers, mobile phone numbers, electronic mail addresses, physical addresses, and the like. For example, presently approximately 35% of Internet users change electronic mail addresses annually, approximately 33% of mobile phone numbers are changed annually, and approximately 40 million physical addresses change every year.
Out-of-date contact information leads to personal losses such as friendships or business losses such as missed opportunities leading to increased productivity and revenue. For example, inaccurate and low-quality customer data results in bad mailings and staff overhead costing upwards of $600 billion a year to U.S. businesses. Hence, a centralized universal address book with up-to-date contact information of customers, business associates, friends, and the like, is a very desirable service.
Due to the high desirability of such a service, conventional online service providers on the Internet, such as PlanetAll.com (now owned by Amazon.com), developed conventional online services for storage and maintenance of personal information on a server, accessible via the Internet. In general, these services allowed a user to subscribe to the service and store personal information at a remote server so that the user's personal information was automatically included in the online address books of other subscribing users of the relevant service.
In these conventional online services, the subscribing owner of the personal information was responsible for maintenance of their information. Whenever the subscribing owner made changes to the information, the online service server was updated. Thereafter, other subscribing users of the system would have access to the updated information by logging into the system and synchronizing with that changed information to update their online address books. Further, these conventional online services provided the ability to synchronize personal information maintained within a personal information manager (“PIM,” e.g., Microsoft Outlook) with the personal information stored on the remote server through a downloadable conventional synchronization software product, such as, for example, Intellisync® for PlanetAll.com, developed by Puma Technology, Inc., of San Jose, Calif.
One problem with these conventional online services is that they must be symmetric. Symmetric services require a subscription membership to the service on both sides of the information exchange facilitated by the service. That is, only subscribers of the conventional online services could update PIM information with each other if each owner of the PIM subscribed to the service. Thus, the service only works for its intended purpose of keeping information updated if both the user providing the updated information and the user seeking an information update subscribed to the service. Non-subscribers were unable to synchronize their PIM information with subscribers and vice versa. Hence, subscribers to the service would be unable to maintain synchronized data with nonsubscribers. This symmetry requirement limited user flexibility in maintaining consistency of data across the various types of contacts.
Another problem with such conventional online services was limited subscriber flexibility in configuring the information in a manner most suitable for that subscriber. For example, the subscribing user lacked flexibility allowing a subscriber to select particular data fields or sets of data fields to update other subscribing users in the service on a per subscriber basis. Thus, subscribers were limited to an “all or none” proposition for updating information between subscribers.
These conventional services (including PlanetAll.com) have been used to promote the deployment over the Internet of private networks of subscribers based on the premise that a subscription to the private network provides a valuable service, i.e., a centralized address book. However, such attempts to deploy private networks have failed due principally to slow deployment rates. In part, these private networks failed to grow their membership because the symmetric nature of the private network service limited the value for the initial set of users. The real value of the private network service could not be realized until large numbers of PIM users subscribed to the private network service. Hence, as long as the number of subscribers of the private network service remained small, new users were not enticed to subscribe. Consequently, without new subscribing users, the private network service could not grow to a size necessary to support its value proposition, and in turn, the private network service would ultimately collapse and fail.
Therefore, there is a need for a system and process to deploy a private network within a public network of users (1) without requiring membership to the private network as a prerequisite for providing a substantial service to members, (2) that increases the value of its service by rapidly acquiring new members, (3) that provides a universal address book of members and non-members, and (4) that includes features to promote rapid membership growth.